The Personal Touch

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

28 April 2024

Acts 18.1-4
1 Corinthians 1.10-18

As a way into our reflection on scripture for this morning,
            I’d like to invite you to take a moment
            to think of those people who have been particularly important to you
                        in the story of your life.
 
They might be teachers, friends, family,
            parents or grandparents, people from church or work;
take a moment and hold their names in your mind,
            and give thanks for them, and for the influence they’ve had on you.
 
<pause>
 
We all of us have people we can give thanks for,
            individuals who have mattered to us and influenced our lives.
 
And of course there will also be those whom we would rather forget,
            people who have made life difficult for us,
                        who we have struggled to relate to,
                        and possibly struggled to forgive.
 
Individuals are complex, we all are,
            but, and here’s the thing: individuals also matter.
Communities such as churches, or even towns and cities,
            are made up of individuals, personalities: people.
 
Here at Bloomsbury, we aren’t a collective corporate entity,
            we’re a group of individuals called into mutual care and action.
 
Of course, at this point I have to pay tribute to one of the best moments
            in that wonderful film, Monty Python and the Life of Brian.
 
Brian is exhorting the crowd that has started following him,
            and hailing him as their leader.
 
He tells them them:
            ‘Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't need to follow me.
                        You don't need to follow anybody!
            You've got to think for yourselves!
                        You're all individuals!’
 
The crowd reply, in perfect unison:
            ‘Yes! We're all individuals!’
 
Brian tries again, telling them:
            ‘You're all different!’
 
But again the crowd reply, as with one voice:
            ‘Yes, we are all different!’
 
But then one lone voice from the crowd calls out:
            ‘I'm not...’
 
And the crowd reply, again in one voice:
            ‘Shhh!’
 
It’s very clever, very Python, and very funny,
            but it also makes a point,
which is that individual identities can become lost
            when group-think takes hold,
and that religious groups are often the context
            in which people’s distinctives are subsumed and voices silenced.
 
And what struck me quite forcefully as I was reading through the passages
            in preparation for this morning,
was the number of personal names mentioned
            in these two short passages.
 
Here they are now:
 
·       Paul
·       Aquila
·       Priscilla
·       Claudius
·       Chloe
·       Apollos
·       Cephas
·       Crispus
·       Gaius
·       Stephanas
 
Ten names, two of them women;
            all of them individuals who, for better or worse,
            played their role in the drama of the early years of the church in Corinth.
 
There can sometimes be a tendency for us to de-personalise
            the various characters we meet in the New Testament.
 
Some of them we just ignore:
            I mean, when did you last hear someone
            preaching a sermon about Cripus, or Gaius, or Stephanus?
 
But then sometimes we go the other way,
            as we mythologise and eulogise the ‘big’ characters such as Peter and Paul,
who become for us kind-of stock characters,
            more archetypes of idealised discipleship
            than individuals with personalities, flaws, and graces.
 
You’ve heard it in a hundred sermons:
            Peter is the comedically inept failure who comes good in the end,
while Paul is the classic villain-turned-hero
            who consistently exercises a superhuman strength of character
            in the face of overwhelming threat and opposition.
 
Take a look at our stained glass windows,
            the four great biblical preachers:
            John the Baptist, Peter, Jesus, and Paul.
 
Their placement up there,
            looking down on whoever dares to stand in the pulpit,
sets them up as idealised characters, perfect preachers of old,
            and if we’re not careful, we lose sight of the individuals,
                        the people, and the personalities,
            that lie behind the names on the page or the images in the glass.
 
So this morning, I want us to keep alert for the personal touch,
            to look for how the people that these names speak of
            featured in the life of the early church;
because in their significance
            maybe we can discover something of the significance of our own lives
            and of the people that have played their part in our stories.
 
So, to Corinth.
 
I went through Corinth when I was about fourteen,
            in a car driving from Athens where my uncle lived,
            to the southern tip of the Peloponnese
                        where the family village was located.
 
We stopped for a few minutes, to have a look at the Corinth Canal,
            this amazing four-mile cut through the isthmus,
            linking the Aegean and Ionian seas.
 
Plans for a canal here date back to before the time of Jesus,
            but it wasn’t actually constructed until 1893.
 
So when Paul was staying in Corinth,
            goods needing to be taken from one side to the other
                        had to be taken off the ships, hauled across,
                        and loaded onto other ships on the other side.
 
There were even some ships that were designed
            so the whole ship could be hauled across
            without needing to be unloaded at all.
 
This trade and transportation made the city of Corinth incredibly wealthy,
            as it could charge a tax for all the goods passing through;
and at the time of those people mentioned in our readings this morning,
            Corinth was a bustling, multicultural, and vibrant city,
            with two ports and a thriving industry.
 
When Paul arrived there, he quickly teamed up with a married couple,
            two Jewish Christians named Priscilla and Aquila.
Between them, they exercised the original ‘tent-making’ ministry
            by, well, quite literally making tents.
 
These days we often use this phrase, tent-making ministry,
            to describe people who have a self-supporting ministry,
where they work a normal job for their money,
            and then volunteer their time in the service of their church.
 
As churches are struggling financially, particularly in rural areas,
            this kind of ministry is becoming more and more common.
 
And as we see in our reading, it has strong precedent,
            with Paul, Priscilla, and Aquila all self-supporting missionaries
            founding the Christian congregation in Corinth.
 
Aquila and Priscilla had fled to Corinth from Italy
            due to Emperor Claudius' decree expelling Jews from Rome.
 
The background to their becoming displaced refugees
            was that whilst the Roman Empire sometimes allowed conquered peoples
                        to maintain their religious practices
            this was always condition on them also acknowledging the Roman deities
                        and worshipping the Emperor.
 
This was a problem for Jewish people,
            whose faith required an unwavering commitment to the God of Israel.
 
So Jews would refuse to worship the Emperor,
            and refuse to make offerings to the Roman gods.
 
This devotion to a single deity created tension with the empire
            and, at times, led to persecution,
            as seen with the expulsion of Jews from Rome in 49 CE.
 
Despite these challenges, individuals like Aquila and Priscilla,
            not only persevered in their faith
            but also became leaders in the early church,
earning recognition from Paul in his letter to the Romans.
 
There is a challenge here to us, I think
            because in our world people who are displaced are big news.
And I think that the church should be at the forefront
            not only of welcoming refugees and asylum seekers,
but also in recognising the leadership and contribution they can make
            to the community of faith.
 
After some months in Corinth, Paul then moved on
            and eventually ended up in Ephesus, in what is now western Turkey,
and from Ephesus, he had a series of correspondences
            back with the church in Corinth,
writing possibly as many as five letters to them,
            although only two of these seem to have survived
            and made their way into our Bibles.
 
We pick up this so-called Corinthian correspondence this morning in chapter 1,
            straight after the initial greetings
            with which all ancient letters started.
 
And it seems that what had prompted Paul to write
            was that there were problems at Corinth
            with division in the church.
 
The issue seems to have been about which strong character
            in the leadership of the early church
            people were following.
 
Some were following Paul, some Apollos,
            some Cephas (or Peter as he was better known),
and others were just being annoyingly super-spiritual
            by saying they followed Christ, and not any human being!
 
Yeah, we’ve all met Christians like that…
 
Anyway, Paul tells them not to be so obsessed with who baptised them;
            as if it matters who did the dunking!
 
The important thing, for Paul,
            was whether the faithful in Corinth were living out
            the truth of their baptism in their daily lives.
 
I’m sure many of us can relate to this issue of hanging our faith
            onto a particular person’s ministry.
 
After all, most of us have a soft spot in our memories
            for the minister who baptised us, or nurtured us in our faith,
            or welcomed us when we turned up at church.
Maybe you even gave thanks for them a few minutes ago.
 
And most of us prefer the preaching of one person over another…
            Are you a Rob Bell person or a Brian McLaren person,
                        a Tom Wright person or a John Piper person?
            Are you a Simon person or a Nigel person,
                        Or are you a Ruth person or a Brian person,
                        a Barrie person or a Howard Williams person?
 
Can those who have come after ever measure up
            against the idealised and mythologised preachers of days gone by?
 
We all do this, and Paul points to a great danger
            in this factionalising and idolising of preachers:
The danger is that of confusing the messenger with the message.
 
The message, the gospel of love, forgiveness, and new life,
            is timeless and universal,
but the messenger is a flawed human,
            capable of both good and bad.
 
I don’t know if you’ve been following the story
            of the downfall of Mike Pilavachi,
            the founder of the Soul Survivor youth church.
 
Many of those whose faith flourished under his ministry,
            have been left reeling in the wake of the stories of abuse.
Does this invalidate everything he said and did?
 
It’s a difficult question, and one faced
            whenever a high profile leader falls from grace.
 
This is why Paul says, in v.18,
            that it is the message of the cross itself which is most important,
            not the words that different preachers use to frame or communicate it.
 
And there is an ambiguity in the Greek here
            which may, or may not, be deliberate.
 
When Paul says that the message of the cross
            is ‘foolishness to those who are perishing,
            but to us who are being saved it is the power of God’,
 
it is not clear whether he is referring to the message ‘about’ the cross,
            or whether he is referring to the message ‘of’ the cross,
in other words, is this about telling the story or narrative of Jesus’ crucifixion;
            or is it about what the cross itself says to us
            about who God is and how God is made known.
 
I tend to think that it is this second option that makes the most sense,
            because the message of the cross to each of us
                        is that God speaks salvation not through the words of humans,
                        but through decisive action in history in the death of Jesus.
 
If salvation is found in the message about the cross,
            that makes us mere spectators or consumers of the message.
and there is a risk of reducing our faith to passive observation
            or intellectual understanding,
which may not inspire active engagement in living out our faith.
 
But if it is found in the message of the cross,
            then we are invited into that story
as participants in what God is doing to turn the world upside down
            by realigning our understandings of power, authority, suffering, and death.
 
This perspective invites us to actively participate
            in the transformative narrative of salvation,
as we live out in the world the truth of the cross
            as the place where God fully embraces
            the depth and breadth of human experience.
 
We’re back to the personal touch here,
            this is about God becoming fully human in the person of Jesus,
identifying with us in all our unique humanity,
            redeeming us, loving us, and holding us.
 
The first-century world was very familiar with the techniques of rhetoric,
            and public speaking was regarded as something of an art form.
 
They knew what it was to be consumers of messages;
            you could go to the forum in any Roman town,
                        the equivalent of Speakers’ Corner in London,
            and hear people talking eloquently about any kind of subject you desired.
 
But Paul wants to differentiate the word of salvation
            spoken by God in the event of the cross,
from the words of those
            who would merely speak about the cross.
 
The crucifixion is not just another subject
            for public spectacle or rhetorical excellence.
It’s not a theological conundrum to be discussed,
            dissected, and debated.
 
For Paul, it is the cross itself which speaks,
            and it does so through the brute fact of its existence in history.
 
And when it speaks,
            the cross cuts through the babbling words of well-intentioned preachers,
proclaiming its own message of Christ crucified,
            of God-on-the-cross,
of the all-powerful becoming the utterly powerless.
 
The message of the cross is an ugly message of suffering,
            a controversial message of cosmic disruption,
            and a dangerous message of political and social revolution.
 
And there is nothing that can, or should, be done by preachers
            to sanitise or beautify the shock, the horror,
                        the ‘scandal’ as Paul puts it,
            of the word of the cross.
 
The communication of the power of divine love
            through the murderous and barbaric act of execution by crucifixion,
speaks directly to us of the radical lengths to which God is prepared to go
            to make God’s own love for humans known.
 
The cross speaks a message of the extent of God’s love,
            which cuts through mere human words
to send a message of forgiveness, acceptance and welcome,
            direct from God’s broken heart to ours.
 
This is the message of salvation,
            and it comes from God to me, and from God to you.
 
And so we’re back at the personal touch,
            with the valuing of each created person
            by the one who made them.
 
People matter, individuals matter.
            You matter, and I matter.
We matter to each other, and we matter to God.
 
And God loves us, and forgives us,
            and welcomes us into the new and radically constituted kingdom of God.
 
As we take our place in this kingdom
            alongside all those others who hear and respond to the word of the cross,
we play our part in the transformation of the world
            as the kingdom of God is made known on earth,
            as it is in heaven.